King of the Road

Here's a quiz: Which American city is particularly notorious for its
traffic? Chances are, you immediately thought of Los Angeles, a metropolis where freeways built for fewer than
three million now buckle under a countywide population more than three times that size.

John Fisher oversees transportation engineering at the L.A. Department of Transportation. In a city marred by stereotypes
of sprawl and smog, he manages the roads and helps give new direction to the growing transportation system. He spoke with The
Atlantic about the challenges and rewards of his job.

What causes traffic congestion
in the first place?

It happens when the land use doesn't the match the
transportation network. The city of L.A. had a population of roughly 2.5
million in the 1960s. And that's when most of our freeway network was built. It
was evident that this was going to be a growing area, but with the
environmental movement in the 1970s, many of the freeways on the master plan
were scrapped. People said, "It will ruin communities and we can't do
this."

But development continued and continued, and there was no
transportation alternative being pursued. It was until the 1990s that we
started building the light rail system. So we have intensified land development
in many centers of the city but we didn't' have the infrastructure to match it.
And as a result our streets became oversaturated. Many of our boulevards were intended
to carry 30 thousand, maybe up to 40 thousand vehicles a day, but some are now
carrying up to 70 thousand vehicles a day. And our freeways, which were
designed to carry maybe 150 to 200 thousand cars per day, are carrying an
excess of 300 thousand cars a day.

So what exactly does
a transportation engineer do?

Here in L.A., we manage the city's surface street system. We
often get a number of requests from neighborhood groups saying, "What can
you do to slow traffic down or get cars off my street?" We look at a whole
toolbox full of measures, like putting in speed bumps, or putting in a
checkerboard stop sign pattern, or in extreme cases, limiting turns into the
local street system to discourage the through traffic from using it.

It's an issue of trying to keep things safe and flowing:
trying to keep neighborhood streets from being bombarded by through traffic when
the arterial streets get too crowded. But also, part of what we do is look
ahead and put in more modes for alternative travel.

How have L.A.'s roads
and transportation system in general changed in the last 10 years and how do
you expect they'll change in the next 10?

The streets themselves have not changed a whole lot in the
past 10 years. The street system we have was largely developed in the 1920s
through the 1940s. We use traffic control devices, signs, pavement markings,
traffic signals, curb zones that make it work just a little bit better to meet
the needs of today rather than what it was like 60, 70 years ago.

But the freeway system is being transformed. We have the
largest carpooling network in the nation, approximately 500 miles. L.A. has
been a leader in that. We're now taking it one step further. Carpools will
still be able to use dedicated lanes on the freeway. But for those who aren't
in a carpool and want to opt in, they can pay a price to enter the lane and be
assured that they'll get 45 mph travel on the freeway. And we've got a major
USDOT grant to change a couple of our freeways to demonstrate that these
express lanes can work.

So we're starting to change our freeways, but we're also
really changing our transit system. Twenty years ago, we had no light rail.
Today we have about six different light rail systems that traverse the city and
the surrounding areas. And there's going to be a major effort over the next 10
years to do many, many more. That will include light rail systems and a subway
system and a major retrofit of several freeways. The reason why that's going to
transform so much in the next 10 years is that a year and a half ago, the
county approved Measure R, which provides about $40 billion in funding to
improve the transportation system in Los Angeles County.

Today if you travel in the nation's most congested area,
you're pretty much stuck on the slow freeway. New alternatives won't eliminate
all congestion, but they will be available as options.

L.A. is a big,
sprawling megacity. Which parts specifically are under your jurisdiction?

The parts within the city limits themselves. There are about
270 square miles in the city of L.A. and a population of about 4 million. But
there are 88 cities within Los Angeles County with a population of about 10
million. So we're less than half of the county's population, but certainly
we're the nucleus and there are many cities closely surrounding us. When you
consider all of Los Angeles County and neighboring Orange County, it is one
continuous developed area. It's sometimes difficult to tell when you've left
the city of L.A. and entered an adjacent city. That's quite unlike many other
cities, where once you're out of the city core, it's fairly obvious that you're
out of the city.

Are there any ways
that new technologies like GPS can be used to help with congestion?

We've been building a traffic management system throughout
the city that can manage all of our streets and traffic signals. We have about
three more years to go before we complete it, but we now have online congestion
information for 80 percent of the city where we can see in real time what the
congestion levels are. And we don't just observe them--we have a computerized
system that will automatically revise the signal timing in response to
congestion.

We're using about 100 miles of fiber optic cable that
eventually feeds to all the intersections. It includes 17,000 roadway detectors
that tell us the congestion levels. We have about 400 video cameras where we
can observe our intersections and streets in real time. And we have 25
changeable message signs where we can give information to motorists to advise
them of congestion or a road closed ahead.

Now we're trying to send some of that information back to
the public. They can go to a website and actually see what the congestion
levels are on the streets. They can then decide, "Gee, do I want to take
the freeway or do I want to take a parallel route to get to my
destination?"

There's been a lot of
talk about reinventing automobiles, especially in terms of energy efficiency.
I'm wondering how our roads and cities are changing to accommodate smarter
cars?

Cars are still going to travel on the roadways. But I
imagine there will be more facilities to allow electric vehicles to be charged.
That's maybe five to 10 years ahead. We don't see the roadway changing simply
because the power source is changing.

But what we do see is that some of the newer vehicles will
be equipped with radios that can communicate with something on the roadside. In
time, maybe we'll be able to talk with the vehicle. Let's say we have a
construction zone. And we'll put up the orange sign saying "Road construction
ahead." Motorists will look at it and sometimes ignore it, not really
believing that there's actual construction going on. What if we had a device on
the roadside that could communicate with the car, equipped with a special
radio, and give the car an audible message? "Construction ahead, slow down
to 25 mph." There are prototypes out there that do this. And maybe that
would be a more effective way to communicate with the motorist.

I bike to work every day
and I find myself constantly wishing that all the cars on the road would
disappear. What do transportation engineers take into account when considering
bikers and pedestrians?

In the last few years, there's been a real emphasis on
improving the environment for other modes of travel, for bicyclists, for
pedestrians, and for the handicapped. We try to make our streets safer for
pedestrians. We have a major program to put in flashing lights and a warning
sign that will flash only when a pedestrian is crossing, called a smart
crosswalk or smart activated pedestrian warning. We're trying to become
credible with the motorists--when these lights are flashing, there really is a
pedestrian, so yield to the pedestrian.

We've looked at some of our streets and determined that some
are mainly for through travel but others are for retail and pedestrian
friendliness. We've looked at how to make the sidewalks wider, how we can
provide more streetscape features such as decorative lighting, trees, and crosswalks.

With bicyclists, there are activists in many of the major
cities demanding more facilities for bicycles, so we're looking at how we can restripe
our streets to accommodate bicycle lanes. I think in time there will be some
streets where we'll deemphasize the streets for vehicular travel and make them
available for bicycle travel.

Tom Vanderbilt's bestseller Traffic makes the point that even with new technologies, traffic
ultimately comes down to human psychology. What role does this play in road
design?

The challenge is that we're dealing with people. It is
people who use the system, whether its pedestrians or bicyclists or transit
users or the motorists. You simply cannot put up a sign that says, "Do
this, do that" and just expect that they'll follow.

One example is that we've had neighborhood areas where we've
tried to reduce the amount of cut-through traffic or commuter traffic on the
streets. We've put in speed humps, checkerboard stop sign patterns, turn
restrictions, so that it'll be difficult to use those streets and we think that
will solve the problem, that traffic will just go back to surrounding arterial
system. We've been partially successful but not entirely successful because
some motorists will find another route through the neighborhood that we hadn't
conceived of, that they're now taking because we restricted the original route.
It is really hard to fool the motorist. We've got to provide a good
alternative. We have to put in features to make the arterial streets more
appealing.

And transportation engineering can't do it all; we really
depend on enforcement and education. For example, we try to make pedestrian
experiences as safe as possible, but if pedestrians are listening to an iPod or
answering e-mail, they're not looking at traffic. That's not something we can
solve with engineering. If motorists are inattentive because they're texting
while driving, it's the same. It all comes down to people, and people have
individual minds. They don't behave necessarily like you would want them to.

The rise of megaregions, the decline of home ownership, the shift away from a car culture - these are among the nation's responses to today's economic turmoil.
Adapted from Richard Florida's new book, The Great Reset. More »